Where is she now?

This morning on my way home from dropping my daughter off at her work, I travelled back through local streets.  In front of a block of housing commission flats at the end of Munroe Street I saw a temporary sign pitched on the nature strip like a billboard, ‘Humanist Society of Victoria’, with its bold blue logo. 

It gave me a jolt.  Such an unlikely place for such a sign. 

Somewhere inside one of the flats I imagined a small group of mostly older people sitting around with cups of tea or coffee in a cluttered lounge room discussing all matters humanist. 

And this, against the backdrop of a radio program to which I listened in the car, where a woman described her husband’s struggle with lung cancer.  This woman coped by sending out weekly emails to friends and family to keep them in the loop in all things ‘Russell’. 

The emails helped Russell’s wife to sort through her own thinking. 

I arrived home before the program ended and so I’m left with snatches of thought.  The woman’s emails, the few I heard were lyrical and well written.  She put in details that many other emails might lack. 

She described the hospital smells and the way her husband grunted at her when she reminded him to take his salt/sugar preparation in order to keep his electrolytes in balance between chemo episodes. 

After he had snapped at her one time to many, she asked, ‘Do you talk to the nurses this way?’

And he said, ‘No. I don’t love the nurses.’

 A poignant reminder of how the people we love can at times treat us like shit because they love us and know we love them in return. 

In one of her other emails, Russell’s wife tells the story of an elderly homeless woman who sits on street corners with a fluffy white dog in a trolley and asks for money.  If you tell this woman you have no money to give she rails against you, as if you are selfish and rotten. 

One day the woman of the white fluffy dog set upon the woman of the emails with such a tirade that the woman of the emails said to her,

‘My husband has cancer.’

And the woman of the fluffy dog responded,

‘I don’t even have a husband, you bitch.’

It puts me in mind of another story I’ve been following on Jennifer Wilson’s blog where she writes about a love affair gone wrong. 

I had noticed that Jennifer had posted less of late.  Her ex-husband had died and I figured maybe she was finding the grief too much.  But it turns out there was more to Jennifer’s absence, including the beginning of an affair that had sent her spiralling. 

It ended badly - as affairs so often do - when the wife of the man with whom Jennifer was having the affair, found out. 

The secret was no more and the man elected to drop Jennifer for his wife.

A common enough story.

Stories, stories everywhere and my head reels. 

I changed the screen image on my computer last night and for a minute considered putting up a picture of my mother some months before she died. 

There on my computer screen I saw my mother’s eyes and they glared at me.  It felt like a reprimand. 

How dare you, she seemed to say, how dare you go on living while I am no more? 

How dare you still have blood flowing through your veins, a heart beat that keeps the blood pumping and breath in you lungs, while I am dead?

I wanted to apologise to her for this, and for the way I might use my fantasy of my mother in my writing. 

While she was alive, I did not feel that my mother was a mother I could rail against, a mother I could treat badly, which is not to say there weren’t times when I did treat her badly.

My mother of the fragile and low disposition that required she believe in goodness in everyone and shunned all that she considered wrong.

I wish now my mother had approached her life with a greater awareness of its complexity, that we could have talked about all things humanist, like the people at the end of Monroe Street, rather than avoid conflict and discussion.  

My mother instead fell back on her religion and her belief in God and the wall came up and she shut me out, and shut out her doubts. 

And where is she now?

Looking down on me from heaven, and saying I told you so?  I’m up here with him and having a ball. 

Or is she no more in all but her spirit and my memory of her, this woman who feared to go into the unknown and into doubt.

Naked on the page

Montaigne shocked everyone when he wrote about the size of his penis.  To his mind, it was small.  

Why, among the many thoughts I have encountered today, does this one stay with me?

 There are other images in my head, too: diamonds from the 1800s that are attached to springs so that when the wearer moves, they tremble, shimmer and dazzle the eye, diamonds en tremblant. 

I tried to have a conversation last night with one of my daughters about a trend that’s come to my attention whereby people post images of their so-called private bits to their lovers. 

It’s not that new, my daughter tells me.  It’s been around for ages.

Apparently, there is a new law that forbids the transmission of such images without a person’s consent. 

Jennifer Wilson, on her wonderful blog, No place for sheep, refers to revenge porn, the business of people taking it out on others by circulating compromising images or photos of the person against whom they want revenge.

A while ago I heard about a young woman in the armed forces who had sex with her boyfriend and unbeknown to her he had organised that the proceedings be videoed and circulated to his friends.  

What’s behind this, I ask myself.  Why do it?  And what is it like for the person so exposed? 

To have a photo of your labia online so that the entire world can see, or a shot of your penis, why so shocking? 

There’s the stuff of exhibitionism, the pleasure we get out of showing off our bodies and the sexual pleasure we get from being on display. 

Then, there’s the opposite: the peeping Tom effect.  The pleasure some might get out of looking, looking in preference to being involved, or being seen. 

I used to think of this as a masculine activity, the Peeping Tom, the flasher, but women can get in on the act, too. 

Women whose bodies have been put on display for centuries. 

When I was a little girl and asked my mother why the bronze Atlas holding a globe of the world on his shoulders in the framed print on the wall of her bedroom was naked, she told me, ‘The human body is beautiful’. 

I had trouble believing her then.  In a strange way I still have trouble.  Bodies can be beautiful but they’re also haunting and troubling and exciting and frightening and all these things rolled into one.  Anything to do with body bits, internal and external seems loaded.

The other day I talked to one of my sisters about prolapses.  In my mind’s eye the image that stays with me is the one that first popped in when I was little. 

One day my mother told me about a cousin in Holland who had suffered a prolapse on the dance floor.  This cannot be, I now know.  You do not suddenly suffer a prolapse.  I imagine they happen gradually, but when I was little I saw it happen on the dance floor.

My mother’s cousin’s insides slip out onto the polished wood floors like glistening red jewels en tremblant.  And my aunt is mortified.  She runs through the room to the toilets dragging her jewels behind her. 

I have since heard that a prolapse as described by my mother, the one that happened to her cousin, was of her cervix.  

This reminds me of other bodily malformations like hernias.  I’ve not seen one of these either.  

Again the idea that your insides slip out of their moorings and appear on the surface of your skin, like a burst bladder, reminds me of pregnancies, late term when it was easy to see the imprint of my baby’s foot on the surface of my skin, the round dome of her head. 

I have dreams where my skin is translucent and I can see inside my body to the unborn baby squashed inside.  And this can only take place when one is naked.  Naked on the page.

There is a YouTube series doing the rounds where a woman is interviewed and during conversation the camera stays on her as she speaks.  She perches on a stool, against a brick wall backdrop in a well lit room and as the interviewer proceeds through a series of questions about the woman and her life, her relationship to herself and her body, the interviewer asks her to take off items of clothing, one by one. 

By the end of the interview the woman sits in her underwear.  We do not see the interviewer. 

There is something strangely non-sexual about this disrobing.  Something that puts us in touch with the woman as a whole person, a woman with a body and mind, not just a sexualised body.  At least that’s how I experience it.  

A slow disrobing rather like entering into a meaningful essay where the writer gradually unfolds ideas, thoughts, images about himself/herself until in the end we are pared back to basics and somehow have much more than just a naked body, and not just any body. 

In the YouTube clip so far I have only seen naked women, and not all of them with ideal bodies. 

There are young bodies and old bodies and even physically disabled bodies.  I’ve yet to see a dark skinned body or a fat body or a hairy body or an amputated body but I imagine there is scope for these and many more. 

One essential ingredient is the capacity to be articulate in the English language in this instance and a preparedness to let it all show.    

And finally, I came across this quote from Anne Patchett: 

‘Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this because it is the key to making art ... I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence. Every. Single. Time. .... This grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore is key. I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.’

War, sex and babies.

One of my daughters tells me I am too inward looking and that I do not engage with the world in any meaningful way. I do not know what is going on beyond a four kilometre radius of my home, she says.

She may be right. I am, as they say, out of touch.

It is hard to put things together.

This is the closest I can get to an image for this post: Mealtime and four cats - the tabby male, the others female, momentarily in harmony.

Today I listened to the radio as I drove around that four kilometre radius of my home, dropping off one daughter here, and shopping there. Food for the table.

When I reached home, I pulled my car into the driveway but did not stop the engine until the programme was over.

A certain Dr Christopher Ryan was talking about sex, but not in the way I’m used to hearing people talk about sex on the radio, not in that nudge-nudge, wink-wink sort of way, or that other, worse still censorious way, where the likes of artists like Bill Henson get hauled over the coals for indecency.

In a nutshell, Ryan talked about the way in which there is a connection between the aggression that gives rise to war and the repression of our sexuality. He cited research that demonstrates a correlation between the length of time babies are held and nurtured along with the amount of latitude offered to adolescents in exploring their sexuality and peaceful societies.

He contrasts certain other societies - which Ryan fears are on the rise - where children are not held for long as infants, nor fed maximally, nor nurtured in warm loving environments and where adolescents are discouraged from expressing their sexuality, with a warrior mentality that leads to war.

Earlier on the radio I had heard a snippet of live footage from a journalist who walked through the streets of Kabul with an Afghani woman to experience first hand what life is like for women there. Apparently the streets are typically filled with men and boys. The number of women outdoors is negligible. Women do not dare to venture out for fear of being harassed and sure enough it happened before the journalist’s very eyes.

The woman he travelled with was grabbed by a man who pulled at her breasts and groped her body.
‘They think a woman on the streets, any woman, is a prostitute,’ she said ‘ and deserves to be treated so.’

Which brings me to my third muddled point. I’ve mentioned before Jennifer Wilson’s blog No Place for Sheep, in which she argues against a political lobbyist, Melinda Tankard Reist who is opposed to pornography and the sexualization of young girls, a laudable concern you might think, but this concern travels hand in hand with Tankard Reist’s religious background which she is apparently reluctant to discuss in public.

Jennifer Wilson’s beef is two fold. She believes that any one who is active as a lobbyist for public behaviour and morality should at least declare their orientation, whether from a religious background, a political background, whatever.

Further and perhaps more importantly, the reason for the brouhaha, Tankard Reist’s lawyers have issued a defamation threat to Wilson if she does not retract her statements. Wilson refuses to be silenced.

Politics and emotions and sex and babies and war all come together and my poor brain cannot tease out the threads in this battle over sexual repression or expression. Can yours?

My mother's piano

I have been following some of the discussion on the blog No place for sheep, in part a debate over feminism, in part over freedom of speech and all because of one woman’s threat to sue another for defamation.

I am amazed at the heat that’s generated there. The language from those who comment is largely academic, or religious or occasionally a rant.

I do not feel equipped to enter into the discussion. It terrifies me. I stand in awe of Jennifer Wilson’s ability to respond to her detractors. I could not sleep at night if it were me.

The comments roll in thick and fast, as if we are on a battle field and the first line of attackers arrive only to be repelled, soon followed by the next line of attack. Of course there are many, perhaps more commenters, who are on Jennifer Wilson’s side.

It puts me in mind of the nature of conflict and how we deal with it, on line and off. I’m not so good at it myself. A fight wells up and I can feel my heart thumping, the perspiration under my arm pits shudders to the surface and my mouth goes dry.

I pitch myself back in time to my mother’s piano in the hallway of the Camberwell house. It is a tall and dark hearse-like instrument with keys made of real ivory. I think of all the dead elephants that went into the making of my mother’s piano, elephants all the way from Africa.

The name above the keys in gold lettering, ornate as a dancer, takes me to Europe in my imagination. A German name maybe, or Austrian. A name that speaks of dead composers, or ancient carpenters, cabinet makers, craftsmen, always men, who built the box that holds the sliced elephant tusks on my mother’s piano.

My mother plays Die Fledermaus. She sings along, Dutch words, military words, words that take her elsewhere back to her girlhood, back to her old life, back home to the Marnixplein where the life she leads now was still a dream, filled with hopefulness and colour, filled with the joy of her youth, her beauty and her prospects.

My mother’s voice rises above the roar of trucks along Canterbury Road. My mother’s voice rises above the cacophony of voices from the television. My father turns the dial higher and higher. The television volume goes up and up.

The house is alive with noise: my mother’s music, my father’s silent screams for attention, louder and louder and I cannot think for the noise of my parents, for the drums of war, the aeroplanes that fly over head, the bombs that drop.
We are silenced.

And all the time behind my eyes an ache swells. I don’t want to fight, I want to cry.